During the span of 13 years, more than 24 men and women — some in high positions, others in menial jobs — learned of the heinous crimes committed by the former defensive coordinator of Penn State’s football team.

Sandusky was found guilty of sexually abusing 10 boys and was convicted on 45 of 48 charges — but not before he destroyed lives.

View full sizeCHRISTINE BAKER, The Patriot-News Former Penn State University Vice President Gary Schultz leaves the Dauphin County Courthouse on Friday, December 16, 2011after a preliminary hearing on failure to report child abuse and perjury charges.

Up and down the chain of command, mandatory reporters and law enforcement agents seemed to have fulfilled their professional obligations, but what about their moral obligations?

“People have a legal mandate, but you have to consider the ethical stance, whether you are going to do something simply because you work with children and want to see this stopped,” said Wendy Hoverter, administrator of Cumberland County Children and Youth Services.

“In a situation like that, one can look back and ask, why not take the next step?” Lavery said. “In a lot of ways, you could look at it as ‘Hey, you stopped something at the moment. That’s a good thing, right?’ But going forward, how and when do we step in? We have to do something. We don’t have a choice.”

Can the same be said about law enforcement?

Police detectives learned in 1998 from an 11-year-old that Sandusky had been showering naked with him. Detectives heard, during a sting operation, Sandusky asking the child’s mother for forgiveness.

In court testimony two weeks ago, former investigator Ronald Scheffler quoted to jurors what he heard Sandusky tell the mother: “I wish I could ask for forgiveness. I know I won’t get it from you. I wish I were dead.”

View full sizeJOE HERMITT, The Patriot-News/fileFormer Penn State athletic director Tim Curley, center, and Gary Schultz, interim senior vice president for finance and business at Penn State University, left, enter District Judge Wenner's courtroom for their arraignment on perjury charges stemming from the Grand Jury investigation of former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

“They follow steps because those are steps they have to take, but they may not believe the outcome is going to be anything else than falsely accused,” Lavery said. “The same value system that applies to general public applies to law enforcement.”

Lavery challenges the notion of a culture of silence.

“Is it really silence?” she said. “Victims themselves do reach out. They aren’t silent. They make an effort. They are shut down.”

'Protecting the institution’

Adults who remain silent or fail to take action after a child reports abuse should be held culpable, said the Rt. Rev. Sean Rowe, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania. “That, to me, is inexcusable,” he said.

In 2010, after a parishioner reported to him having been abused for decades by the former bishop, Rowe learned that church hierarchy had known for more than 20 years that the Rev. Donald Davis, who died in 2007, had been molesting girls.

“There was silence around the whole issue,” Rowe said. “I think what happens is we’re interested in protecting the institution and not the children.

Rowe said institutions such as Penn State, the Roman Catholic Church and his church are pressured by insurance companies, attorneys, advisers and boards of directors, who caution leaders from revealing anything damaging or scandalous.

“We are too often allowing ourselves to be controlled by other interests rather than the truth and doing what’s right,” he said.

Rowe went public with the abuse allegation, leading scores of other women to come forth.

View full size JOE HERMITT, The Patriot-News, fileOld Main at Penn State University.

Child sexual abuse happens everywhere, but in places like Penn State and the Roman Catholic Church, the interests of the larger community trump those of the individual, advocates said.

A 1990 Penn State graduate, Julie Parr attended the university at a time when black and female students were challenging the administration.

Parr, who held a student government Cabinet position, surmises how a Division I football powerhouse would resist challenges to its reputation and values.

“It’s clear since this case came out that there is a culture of hegemony there,” said Parr, assistant vice president for development at Quinnipiac University.

“There’s an implied power that people had a very hard time navigating around,” she said.

That the inner circle of Penn State authorities — including Spanier, Schultz and Curley — failed to appropriately respond to reports of alleged child sexual abuse speaks to the power that football and Paterno had over the university, indeed, the state.

A mythical football figure, Paterno might have never wielded a stick and demanded the abuse be stopped, but no one around him was willing to challenge the myth.

“It’s so seducing,” Parr said. “Instead of upsetting the apple cart, you don’t think about it. The power of Joe Paterno. The pleasure. It’s so seducing, you suppress it. You don’t think about it. It’s too threatening.”

'Looked the other way’

Even in the midst of an investigation, Sandusky’s reputation remained untainted.

In 2000, Terry Holland, then athletic director at the University of Virginia, considered Sandusky for a head coaching job.

View full sizeJOHN C. WHITEHEAD, The Patriot-News/filePenn State head coach Joe Paterno, right, and Jerry Sandusky on the sidelines.

“The information we received on Coach Sandusky’s reputation was all very positive, but that information came from former Penn State coaches and players who had coached with him and/or played for him,” said Holland, now athletic director at East Carolina University.

"Our interest never reached the point of asking anyone at Penn State for recommendations or doing a background check, so I do not know what those would have yielded.”

The job ultimately went to Al Groh, but Holland said Sandusky raised no red flags.

“[I] guess it is possible we would have come back to Sandusky if Groh declined,” Holland said in an email interview with The Patriot-News. “[I] can’t speak for football community but no one I know was aware.”

At the time, Schultz, then in charge of the campus police, knew about allegations of Sandusky’s sexual misconduct in a shower at the football building, he told a grand jury in testimony this year.

Howard Fradkin, a psychologist with Malesurvivor.org, a support network for men who were sexually abused, thinks that if Sandusky had been molesting girls, authorities would have taken immediate action.

“They slapped Jerry Sandusky in the hand and said, ‘Don’t go into the shower,’ ” Fradkin said. “That’s absurd. It was obviously an inadequate response to a serious predator, and his action was so minimized. It’s tragic.”

Fradkin stipulates that the male-dominated football culture of Penn State responded to a deeper motivation: homophobia.

“I do believe the response is due in part to the administrators’ discomfort with the acts that were being done,” he said.

State Sen. Jake Corman, a Centre County Republican and a 1993 Penn State alumnus, said the university community cannot be painted with one brushstroke.

“It’s an educated community, a hardworking community,” he said. “It’s a community that cares about kids. There are thousands of people who volunteer time and money to help kids. That speaks more volumes about what the community is like than a few who had possession of knowledge and did not act upon it.”

Victims of child sexual abuse said all they needed was one adult ally, one advocate to believe their stories.

“It was textbook, right up the chain, nobody reporting to police ... everybody protecting the institution, not the children,” said Mark Rozzi of the Sandusky case. “They looked the other way again. I don’t know how you do it.”

Rozzi said that when he was 13 in 1984 he was sexually molested in a shower by his priest. The priest died in 1999, but Rozzi’s cries for help went unheeded by those he and his family most trusted.

The Monday after the assault, Rozzi and his mother went to the principal of his Philadelphia parochial school.

“He said he would look into it, see if anything should be done,” said Rozzi, who lives in Berks County. “He never got back. We found out later he knew what was going on.”

“I truly believe in the power of the institution. A lot of these people, they feel they are obligated to the people they are being employed by. ... They walked the line,” Rozzi said.

Rozzi still suffers from nightmares, depression and panic attacks.

Baselice has turned his back on the Catholic Church and remains dumbfounded that adults who hear even the faintest utterance of a child being sexually molested fail to take action.

A week ago, when the Centre County jury handed down its guilty sentence on Sandusky, Baselice cheered along with hundreds of others outside the courthouse.

He was taken aback when the Sandusky family cried learning the head of the family would go to prison.

Sandusky will be sentenced later this year. It’s likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

But Baselice said for families of those who have been abused, there’s no escape from their own anguish. “We’re not going to get out,” he said. “The only end of the line for this crap I’m going through is death.”

Related Stories

Featured Story

Get 'Today's Front Page' in your inbox

This newsletter is sent every morning at 6 a.m. and includes the morning's top stories, a full list of obituaries, links to comics and puzzles and the most recent news, sports and entertainment headlines.

optionalCheck here if you do not want to receive additional email offers and information.See our privacy policy

Thank you for signing up for 'Today's Front Page'

To view and subscribe to any of our other newsletters, please click here.